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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

I have no problem with Guaranteed Income, paid by people freely giving to those in need. If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now.

I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. Stealing is stealing, no matter how you butter it up, and no matter if Peter will miss it, and no matter if Peter has enough that it doesn't matter. Repeat: Ends do not justify the means.

It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them, as the World Poverty Level is defined at an income $1.90/day or $693.5/year. The upper bound on worldwide wealth is only bound by energy and raw materials, which we have nearly unlimited supplies of both.

My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. You skip the extreme overhead of government's and every crooked politician grabbing a handful out of the hat and every special interest taking a cut. If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing.

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Thing is the 'wealthy' depend on exploitation far out of sight to sustain their lifestyles. A real global guaranteed income would not be 'stealing', it would be a step towards correctly remunerating those at the bottom of the labour force / supply chain. That being said, it's a tragedy that it will never happen and the worst offenders are the ones with the most luxurious lives, squirreling their ill-gotten gains away into overseas trusts.

>I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul

Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position.

>My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023

If charity was an effective case against poverty, we wouldn't need "more" charity.

Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are. People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why we are mired in identity politics and are beholden to bands of 80 year old children yelling at one another between oxygen hits and running the country into the ground.

I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.

>Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are.

A large amount of people think the Earth is flat. Am I now supposed to consider flat-earthers a serious position?

>People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why

I can perfectly fathom it, much like I can understand why someone would believe the Earth is flat. That doesn't make the position any less serious.

>I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.

Much like a flat-earther, I consider those who think the taxation is theft have not put any actual research or thought into their position, and have simply come to that position by naively interpreting the first experiences they have come to understand from their senses.

And yet belittling still gets you no where. Sounds like you aren't interested in conversing with others and rather just want to garner votes from your tribe.

If you found my comments belittling, then you should consider if you have a personal attachment to the idea that taxation is theft. If I thought 2+2=5, and someone called me out as wrong, I wouldn't take personal offense to it.

If you seriously think taxation is theft, I think the best I can offer is to think about how do you define ownership? Before you have theft, you must have ownership.

> If you seriously think taxation is theft, I think the best I can offer is to think about how do you define ownership? Before you have theft, you must have ownership.

I think this gives an interesting insight into the point of contention. It appears that one side views the money about to be taxed as their property whereas the other side views that money as something else. Is that a fair assessment?

If someone views the money as their property and the act of taxation as the government seizing that property (especially if the government spends it unwisely), I can see a logical route to "taxation is theft."

However, if someone views society as a group bound by a social contract with a shared responsibility to ensure nobody falls too far down the ladder lest they lose their ability to contribute to society, I can also see a logical path to "taxes are a shared responsibility for the maintenance of society."

I still tend to think that government could fund all the welfare it needs if it simply stopped wasting so much money on cronyism and frivolous projects.

>Is that a fair assessment?

Think about what you are saying when you say "my property". Owning something is not a natural law of the universe. If I go into your house and take your laptop how are you going to take it back? If I'm stronger than you, then tough shit. Or we have a war and if I win the war I take your stuff. Most people would call the police (the government) to sort it out, and the government will look at the law and decide who has rightful ownership.

Your right to property is given to you by the state and you pay your taxes for that right. Without the state, you don't have property; you are a warlord with a gun up until a stronger warlord decides to run you over.

>I still tend to think that government could fund all the welfare it needs if it simply stopped wasting so much money on cronyism and frivolous projects.

This is entirely different from the "taxation is theft" angle, but somehow "taxation is theft" only ever seems to apply when it's used for welfare and not for highway subsidies. It's strange that you are not "robbing peter to pay paul" when taxes are used to bomb russians.

The government collects revenue and must decide on the most efficient way to spend that revenue. Many economists have hypothesized that giving money directly to people is better than social programs such as food stamps.

> Your right to property is given to you by the state and you pay your taxes for that right. Without the state, you don't have property; you are a warlord with a gun up until a stronger warlord decides to run you over.

That's an interesting perspective. But I can't help noticing that it runs contrary to the founding principles of many societies - namely that theft is inherently wrong and one of government's roles is to enforce property rights. The very concept of theft itself presupposes the existence of property. Ie: your rights exist outside of any government. A government's role can only serve to enforce or restrict those rights - they are not granted by government. But I can also see how a difference of opinion on this could lead people to draw very different opinions with regard to a wide variety of other matters.

Putting aside the definition of what is property, if one considers money as a medium of exchange representing one's individual productivity, some might view taking someone's money without their consent as merely one-step removed from taking their time and labour without their consent.

When you say the "one of government's roles is to enforce property rights", you do realize that you are talking about other people right? Leaving money out of it, you expect the government (another human being) to expend labour on your behalf?

Would you then consider that theft of the enforcement of property rights? The idea that "taxation is theft", but simultaneously the government should defend your property rights (for free I guess?), is strange. It makes more sense to say that not paying your taxes is theft.

What those taxes are can be argued in a democratic society (as opposed to a monarchy where you might not have any say), but to call it theft is just to be wholly ignorant of the social contract we have here. Furthermore, these arguments tend to be used exclusively when it comes to welfare.

> The government collects revenue and must decide on the most efficient way to spend that revenue.

That's a reasonable textbook definition. How closely one thinks this represents the reality of how government actually functions will lead to highly variable opinions about how much of the public's money the government should have access to.

> Many economists have hypothesized that giving money directly to people is better than social programs such as food stamps.

I agree, if we as a society believe that some level of social welfare is worthwhile, then giving money directly to the people who need it is better than the current strings-attached programs that tend towards locking people into the poverty cycle. But very seldom are these programs proposed as a replacement, they are usually offered as an additional program. This means, more taxes, more bureaucracy and more waste, not less.

>But very seldom are these programs proposed as a replacement, they are usually offered as an additional program.

Blowing up an existing system that, if flawed, supports millions of people for another experimental system seems like a bad idea. Just like how removing an API with no deprecation schedule just because a new one is launched is a bad developer experience?

Calling the op's serious opinion unilaterally "unserious" is belittling.

There will never be a sufficiently nice enough way to call someone wrong on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Straw_man

I'm not sure how this is a strawman. My point is simply that just because a large number of people believe something, it does automatically make it a serious position.

> A large amount of people think the Earth is flat.

Citation needed. I wager the actual statistic is a rounding error.

> Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious"

First, I don't think half the US population seriously thinks taxation is theft. Mainly because a vast majority of us support medicare and defense spending, which are funded out of tax.

But this is where you get into "unserious" territory. Let's say everyone agrees to abolish taxation. That means no government, which means no government services, which leads to a lack of policing. In that world, who is going to enforce your property rights? Only thing ensuring things you consider yours stay yours is if you are stronger than everyone else.

Are you saying that half the US population really want to go back to eras when you only trusted your own tribe, wars and pillaging were rampant and only the might was right? If you don't intend to say that, then please explain who will enforce property rights in a nation of 330M people without any services funded by taxes.

I'm assuming OP meant income tax. Those who say "taxation is theft" (Ron Paul's tribe) are referring to the Federal income tax exclusively. It's a catchy phrase that isn't descriptive enough. But too be fair, "federal income taxation is theft" isn't going to make a nice t-shirt.

Also, "half" doesn't matter and I shouldn't have mentioned it. What matters is OP made a serious statement and then the comment I replied to dismissed it out of hand. Regardless of total percent, its a view which you will encounter at a level high enough that this sort of dismissal has effectively shut you off to a very large group of people.

> I'm assuming OP meant income tax.

What are the principled differences between income vs other (sales, property, inheritance) taxes? And why does it matter whether it is at a federal level? We still need services at federal level, eg. to run our armies who are essential to deter potential invaders.

Mostly historic, federal income tax was illegal until the early 1900s. The other difference, as I understand (not well versed in this it's not my pet-problem, I just like to understand something of what drives others to think what they think) is that an income tax brings a double tax. Taxed on all incoming money and then taxed on nearly all out going money. Prior to the amendment that made the federal income tax, there was still a Federal government, they relied on tariffs and other such taxes instead.

> Mostly historic, federal income tax was illegal until the early 1900s.

So what? They followed a due process of getting the amendment ratified, which means there was overwhelming support for it. Seems pretty legit to me. If you don't like it, pass another amendment repealing it. If it is truly bad and people hate it, they will repeal it just like what they did to prohibition.

> an income tax brings a double tax.

And so? Ultimately, we the people want stuff (medicare, social security, defense, national parks...) so we gotta pay for it. If you think you have a better alternative, propose it. If you think the stuff people want is frivolous, propose repealing all that spending and see if people buy into your vision.

You should consider asking someone who cares and believes this. I literally just thought the other guy was being uncharitable. Taxation as theft ain't my hill to die on.

It's certainly not half, and really how we get mired in these things is way more complex than what you mentioned; I'd argue a lot of getting bogged down and accomplishing nothing is people whose views are not worth consideration (not all of them are, shocker!) clamoring about how oppressed they are that their disingenuous positions are not being taken seriously.

If someone really believes taxation is theft, that is past the point of consideration. That leaves little avenue for reconcile, makes the bias very clear, and puts on full display the lack of critical thinking.

I get the sense this discussion has more to do with which team you play for than the substance of the policy. Team A will lean hard into it because Team B is hard against it, and vice-versa.

Every year, we all have the option to donate more money to the government or related charities, voluntarily. That money could be put to good use on programs like this. How many people advocating for such policies do it? Probably very few. It's much easier to spend someone else's money than your own. Especially if we can convince ourselves that people with more money than us are bad people and don't deserve the same respect as we do. Where have we seen that play out before?

You can't seriously propose a solution for the tragedy of commons scenario. I wouldn't voluntarily donate money to the government because it is dumb to make your living worse for statistically zero gain (because a single donation is like that, and no one else would donate). But I fully support taxation (as a concept, current brackets and laws are very inefficient), exactly because it is enforced on all population at gunpoint. I would not join army voluntarily, but I actually was in one because we have a mandatory draft and unfortunately a reason for it now.

The only way humans can function in communities bigger than 100 people is enforcement of resource sharing, or they will be expelled/punished. This doesn't mean that enforced sharing is bad in absolute terms. It is relatively "bad" and inefficient, but the only alternative is chaos and no sharing at all.

You are saying that half the US population views taxation as theft.

Technically just the income tax, but yes somewhere between 40 and 55 percent view it that way, the exact number depends on who is asking. Pew number are more like 55%, MSNBC lower.

Come on, seriously. Show your source. I've got a Pew chart here that says 53% say they "pay the right amount" in taxes, while another 4% say they pay less than their fair share.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/10/5-facts-on-...

You're saying that half the population don't just say "more than my fair share", but that they view it as literal theft.

Not every opinion deserves consideration.

Alas, that's the slippery slope that's led us here. In a conversation, all opinions have value.

Calling it stealing in the first place is inflammatory.

Taxation by itself is inflammatory and has been the reason for most uprising, revolutions and wars since the beginning of history. Using a higher perspective it is easy to see that taxation is analogous to war.

>Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position.

Yeah, taxation is obviously a protection racket, not theft.

That is a more accurate description. Like organized crime forces you to buy its services under threat of violence if you don't, government forces you to pay taxes to fund its services under threat of violence if you don't. One difference is that you often can't even avail yourself of the services that the government is forcing you to pay for.

Not at all, I come from France, and we've been robbed by taxation since the country started. There was a time where priests, from the church, came to collect in exchange of telling us all was well, we were at the position God wanted us to be and we should obey the local lord.

Imagine paying taxes for that service and not calling it "stealing".

One can challenge how tax are allocated or extracted.

But it's hard because most people only care once it s so inefficient and unfair nothing works anymore. And I do wonder where the money could come for a universal income ... ourselves at best ? Foreigners at worst ?

Replying with some vague hundreds-years-old anecdote is also incredibly unserious.

I think the issue with modern society when it comes down to it is we pretend we're not playing a long running game of monopoly when we are. There's a fixed amount of resources on Earth. It's weird to look at the new generation entering this game and say that this is the way it needs to be, when they didn't have any involvement in how it came to be. The entire idea of land ownership or resource ownership is strange when you think about it.

We've mostly decided as a society that taking other folks resources by force is wrong, essentially cementing the last generation of folks that did so successfully as the aristocracy.

If the nonviolent polite resource sharing society we've tried / are trying to construct is to last, resource sharing of some sort must be enforced (taxes, etc.).

> If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them...

You just don't get it: Everybody who is richer than me are spoiled brats, born with a silver spoon in their mouths, they should give money to me. Everybody who is poorer than me are lazy bums and drug addicts. I shouldn't have to give anything to them.

There are so, so many things wrong with this. Unless you want to directly and individually pay every single welfare worker, police officer, health inspector, road maintenance worker, and hire companies directly to fix roads, water services, etc...you don't have a leg to stand on.

And if you do want to pay these people individually, you're not capable of making a judgement on the validity of taxation as a viable mechanism.

Nobody got their wealth just by themselves.

Just replace "stealing" by paying back what you owe to society for providing you with everything you needed to make money: a safe environment, the rule of law, infrastructure, maybe education and healthcare, public investments into fundamental research etc...

Then if our society decide to give a part of what you paid back to Paul, that's a political question but it is not fundamentally unfair.

I like to add that I'm personally incredibly thankful to the Government for creating the earth we live on, the sun, the moon and all the stars.

wage labor is also theft. before you claim "but the worker agreed to it", also recognize that by being a citizen of a country, you agree to pay their taxes. if your response to people telling you that wage labor is theft is "then don't work" then you should also agree that if you don't like taxes, move elsewhere. you'll then realize that it (as well as the option to not work) are not viable options and that both wage labor and taxation are coercion. taxation with representation but also employee representation.

This makes no sense. Name a country you can become a citizen of, as easily as getting a new job.

It’s like they set up a bunch of secret clubs and will only let people become members by paying for access or trading your skills and labor for permission to live there.

That’s why these “taxation = theft” arguments are so stupid. Of course there is no where else you can go where you won’t get taxed because society costs money to maintain. You can try “hiding” inside a country and avoid contributing but at some point that country or society is going to notice that you’re taking and not contributing and they’ll deal with you accordingly. If you don’t have any money you’ll probably get locked up - if you do they might try to take it and lock you up anyway. And then maybe you’ll wish that someone would give you basic assistance to pay for society because you no longer can.

Not a citizen, but there's a lot of countries that you can incorporate without being a citizen, for tax purposes. liechtenstein for example. So taxation is indeed a competitive sphere (but it's only for the rich, not for the those of working wage).

Liechtenstein, population 39k?

I would say this proves my point. It’s not something most people can do (unlike getting a new job).

> being a citizen of a country, you agree to pay their taxes.

Literally born into servitude.

At some point everything.. anything that alters the status quo can be considered 'a taking'.

The way you're framing it, is any form of taxation is a taking.

I have no particular issue with welfare, because fewer poor people benefit all of us, even if you do not happen to see the benefit of it - you still receive the benefits from fewer people living in poverty.

I have a favorite quote from LBJ -

"We dont ask much, the average American does not demand much, but we have a right to expect in this rich country, if we're willing to work from daylight to dark, we have a right to expect a job, to provide food for our family, a roof over their head, clothes for their bodies, an opportunity to have our children educated, and the right to worship god according to the dictates of our own conscience. Poverty not only strikes at the needs of the body it also taxes the spirit and undermines human dignity. It is not enough for the congress to pass laws, we will not will our war against poverty until the conscience of the entire nation is aroused. We will not succeed until every citizen regards the suffering of neighbors as a call to action, we will not overcome until every child in every city and every town joins its parents to help us mobilize its resources. Not in a day, and not in a year will these goals be reached, but if we begin the effort, if we approach the task with great enthusiasm and not with cynicism these achievements will be the glory, the glory of your generation. So I have come here today to ask for your heart and your hand to ask you to join us in a similar cause. Help us to build a better land, help us to built a greater society, help us open wide the doors of opportunity and we invite all to come in and when have done this it will one day be said of America that she was a burning and shining light in mans journey on earth."

The issue is, we've made the system too unfair - it's too hard to succeed, once you're below a certain point you dont have bootstraps to pull upon. The costs from poverty cost all of us something, and make for dangerous men. Voting to tax yourself to provide for them is a cheap form of insurance.

> If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now.

Probably not. The average person generously spends maybe 6 hours a week jaw-jacking and 40+ hours a week working to make some CEO somewhere richer. There's a lot more charity time to be unlocked and donated by reducing society's systemic reliance on extracting profits than there is by telling people to jaw-jack less.

> I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul.

I take things from other people all the time. I call it receiving stock dividends. The McDonald's employee works for an hour, produces $15 worth of value for the company, gets paid $10.10, $3 is sent to the government and a fraction of a penny is sent right to my brokerage account.

Whenever I look at my brokerage account, it always feels unfair. It really does feel like I'm stealing, and I probably am by some definition. People wake up in the morning, go to their 9-5 job, and I take part of their paycheck. Then, I walk into McDonalds and the employee makes me a burger in exchange for the part of their paycheck that I took. All because I have funny made up number with the high-bits set to "1" in my brokerage account.

At its heart, capitalism requires taking something from someone else. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

> It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich.

It's sad that so many people think capitalists make their fortunes without taking something from the working class. You probably believe that Jeff Bezos truly puts in 1,000 times more work or is 1,000 times more intelligent than his most highly compensated software engineer.

> If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing ... My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023.

Respectfully, the answer to wealth inequality isn't for the bottom 90% who own 30% of the wealth to shuffle it around between each other. The answer is to unlock the other 70% of the wealth. In other words, the answer is advanced charity by the richest 10%, not basic charity by the everyday person. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with basic charity, because a little charity is always better than no charity, but I'm not about to put my signature on a piece of paper and reduce Malaria deaths in Africa by 90% like Gates did.

Look at it this way: Guaranteed income is a non-zero income floor that corrects for past, ongoing, and potentially future theft indiscriminately.

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